The Support Group Blog

Fun fact: the term debug was coined by Admiral Grace Hopper while working on the Mark II computer in the 1940's. A moth became stuck inside the computer and Grace commented that they were debugging the computer as they literally worked to remove the bug. The moth was eventually freed and then the term stuck. You can now find that moth at the Smithsonian Museum.

Backwhen I was introduced to JavaScript, I used alert dialogs to debug my javascript code. If you're chuckling reading this then you're probably a pro! If not, you should watch my demo where I show you a few different ways to invoke a JavaScript debugger to help you find a bug or resolve a semantic issue in your code.

Google App Maker is pretty stylish right out of the box. It has the modern and attractive Google Material Design theme baked right in. As you add new widgets, text objects and buttons, they are automatically styled using this well-known visual language. Nonetheless, there are some of us who would like to give our new apps a little personal flair. Whether it's because we want to get user buy-in or to brand the app so that it works seamlessly with our daily workflow, Google App Maker gives us the tools to put our own fingerprint on our new app. We just have to know where to go and what to do.

Let’s Play Cards!

TheCard Windowwas introduced in FileMaker 16. We learned some pretty cool development techniques and use cases for Card Windows during one of the breakout sessions we attended duringDevCon 2018.

TRANSACTIONS

Card Windows can be a great tool for transactional programming. You can easily arrange for transactional events to either pass or fail, meaning all edits/adds/deletes that happen during the transaction are either committed or not. Cards can be leveraged to guide the user through a process, storing the data via global fields, variables or JSON arrays along the way. Ultimately, the data will only be committed if the user completes all of the steps. Incidentally, you can also use slide panels to create this user experience.